Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  “Forget it,” the officers in the patrol car were told. “If someone reports a crime tomorrow, then we will investigate it.”

  When morning broke at the villa, the staff held a meeting. None of the guards had any idea what had happened. They were still deep in what ketamine-users know as the “k-hole,” a place where people lose their sense of time, place, identity and reality, where their memory is wiped away and their mind is beset by hallucinations. The rest of the staff agreed that Señor Tumbo had been alive and well when he left the building, so if he wanted to come back, he would. In the meantime, there was the mutilated body of a stranger to dispose of. All of them agreed that it was not wise to trouble the police with such a trivial matter. And the head gardener named César was given the job of burying it as deeply as possible in the furthest, least accessible corner of the property, while the others got to work cleaning up the mess.

  When they thought about it, the staff of the villa realized that they were actually in an ideal situation. Everyone in the neighborhood was accustomed to Señor Bannock and Señor Tumbo being away for months at a time. The supermarket where they bought their food kept an account that was paid automatically by a bank somewhere in America that also handled all the utility bills. The garage was filled with cars and there was a credit card for the petrol. If they all just kept quiet and told anyone who asked that the owners were away on business, they could keep living in luxury for as long as they liked.

  The police therefore received no further reports from the villa, and saw no reason to return. So far as everyone was concerned nothing of any note had taken place at all.

  Hector called the royal palace in Abu Zara City, asked to speak to His Highness the Emir and, once he’d given his name, was put straight through to the Emir’s private office. A few moments later, he heard the voice of the ruler of Abu Zara.

  “I am so glad that you called, Hector. I was very sorry—in fact, disgusted to hear that the Americans allowed that animal Congo to escape. I can only imagine how you must feel, after all that he has done to your family. If there is anything I can do, you have only to ask.”

  Most Englishmen, confronted by an offer like that, instinctively refuse it, not wanting to put the other person to trouble on their account. But what might pass for good manners in England would constitute a profound insult to a man like the Emir, who would not take kindly to the refusal of an offer of help. Cross knew that, and so had no compunction about replying, “Thank you, Your Highness. Your concern means a lot to me and, as it happens, you could be a real help.”

  “I am delighted to hear that. What is it that you require?”

  “A few days ago I discovered where Johnny Congo was hiding in Caracas. My men and I attempted to seize him, but he escaped. I am very concerned that my daughter Catherine Cayla may once more be in danger. I would like to move her immediately to the apartment in Abu Zara where I know she will be safe. May I have your permission to do that?”

  The Emir chuckled softly. “You know that I have, how do you say, a ticklish spot for the young lady in question. Please send her to be a guest in my country forthwith, if not sooner.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness. I’m very grateful indeed for your kindness.”

  Catherine Cayla, accompanied by her nanny Bonnie Hepworth and her entire entourage, took off the following morning and flew directly from London Heathrow to the little Gulf State where the Bannock Oil security headquarters were situated.

  They were immediately installed in the apartment on the top floor of a building whose other occupants were all senior politicians or members of Abu Zara’s vast royal family. As a consequence the building was a virtual fortress, from the razor wire that guarded its perimeter to the security systems that monitored every square millimeter of every floor and the steel baffles, designed to deflect any rocket grenade or missile fired from the ground below, that protected the windows of the Cross apartment.

  The place had been created as a safe house for Catherine Cayla, where she could live without Cross having to worry about her. Her trust fund took care of the phenomenal cost of upkeep.

  Ten days had passed since the Caracas operation. Cross and O’Quinn were back in London and preparations for the offshore assignment at the Magna Grande field were in full swing when Nastiya’s phone started ringing and she saw Yevgenia’s name pop up on the screen.

  “I just had a call from da Cunha,” her younger sister said.

  “Did you give him the numbers that Papa got for us?” Nastiya asked.

  Yevgenia giggled. “He didn’t seem awfully interested in them. He was much more interested in your private number.”

  “I hope you didn’t give it to him—the real one.”

  “No, I told him I’d get in touch with you and let you know he’d called.”

  “Good.”

  “So are you going to call him?”

  Nastiya knew that her sister was smiling in a conspiratorial, gossipy sort of way as she asked the question. She replied in what she hoped was a flat, businesslike fashion: “Why? I found out what I needed to know. There’s nothing to be gained by talking to him again.”

  “He sounded very sexy,” Yevgenia wheedled. “You know, with his French accent . . .”

  “To some people, maybe.”

  “Well, I thought he was very charming.”

  “Yes, he’s got charm all right . . .”

  “Oh, so you do like him!” Yevgenia exclaimed, delighted to have caught Nastiya in her trap.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Come on, admit it, you think he’s sexy.”

  Nastiya decided it was time to show who was in control. “Let me remind you, little sister, that I am a married woman and I love my husband, so even if I can see how other women might think a man was attractive, that doesn’t mean that I find him attractive myself.”

  “Well, then, tell me what another women would see when she looked at Mateus da Cunha?”

  “Hmm . . .” Nastiya wondered whether to end the conversation right here and now. But Yevgenia was her long-lost sister and one of the things sisters did—or so Nastiya assumed—was swap tittle-tattle about men, so she went along with Yevgenia’s question. “Well, another woman would see a man who’s about one meter eighty-five tall . . .”

  “Ooh, I like that! It means that even in my highest heels I still have to tilt my head up to kiss him. Does he have a good body?”

  “I think it’s clear that he takes regular exercise, yes.”

  “And is he black? I’ve never had a black boyfriend. Papa would go crazy!”

  “He’s mixed race: his mother is French. So his skin is paler than a full-blooded West African and his facial features are more Caucasian: narrower nose, thinner lips.”

  “What about, you know . . . down there? Is that African? I hope so!”

  Almost certainly, Nastiya thought, but what she said was, “How should I know?”

  “Oh, don’t play the innocent with me, big sister! I bet you know exactly how big he is!”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Then I’ll just have to find out for myself!”

  Now Nastiya really was concerned. Yevgenia wasn’t nearly ready to take on a man like da Cunha. “No, Yevgenia, don’t do that,” she said. “Listen to me, this is serious: Mateus da Cunha is very handsome, very clever, very charming and he knows exactly the effect he has on women.”

  “Mmm . . . yummy!”

  “But he’s also a very dangerous, ruthless, cynical bastard. The only thing he really cares about is power and he’ll do anything to get it. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, and it’s all good!”

  “No, really it’s not. You know how Papa hurt you? Well, that was nothing, nothing at all next to the damage da Cunha could do.”

  “All right, all right, I get it,” said Yevgenia, sounding like a sulky teenager.

  Nastiya seized her opportunity to change the subject. “Good, now I have something else I wanted to talk to you about. I
was thinking that maybe you could come to stay with me in London for a few days. I’d love you to meet Paddy and some of the people I work with. We have to go to Africa soon, but before then, maybe?”

  “Yes please! I haven’t been to London for ages and I have so many friends who live there.”

  “Good, then it’s settled. Now all we have to do is agree on the date . . .”

  Aram Bendick was hot, sweaty and jet-lagged, and his temper, abrasive at the best of times, was verging on the volcanic. He’d got on a Gulfstream G500 in New York City that flew to Cape Verde—whatever the hell that might be—for a refuel. “Just a precaution,” the pilot said. “We could get where we are going on a single tank, but only just.”

  “So where the hell are we going?” Bendick asked and the pilot just smiled and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”

  Bendick would never have got on the plane at all, and certainly not without his usual six-man bodyguard, every man of them ex-Mossad, if it hadn’t been for the second tranche of $50 million that Juan Tumbo had placed in an escrow account with the words: “If you don’t get back to New York within seventy-two hours of your take-off, that money gets sent to your lawyers. You can tell ’em what to do with it. Even if your plane lands just one minute after that time, you still get the money.”

  The first fifty million had arrived in his fund, exactly as Tumbo had promised. The second was checked out by his lawyers and they were satisfied it was legit. Bendick figured he had a lot of enemies, but none of them were crazy enough to throw away a hundred mill just so they could kill him. So he got on the plane at three in the afternoon, worked all the way to Cape Verde, then ate dinner at the start of the second leg, watched a movie and finally crashed for three or four hours. He was woken just before they landed at a two-bit excuse for an airport some place where no one had heard of air-conditioning and the immigration officials made the obstructive jerks on the desks at JFK look as smooth and charming as George freakin’ Clooney.

  The clocks told him it was eight in the morning, but it was already hot and humid and it was a blessed relief to discover that the Range Rover waiting for him outside the terminal had air-conditioning and comfortable seats to soothe him. Bendick would have grabbed some much-needed shut-eye, but the road was so full of potholes it was like trying to sleep on top of a bouncy castle. So he forced his weary, bloodshot eyes to stay open and looked out at a giant slum, where all the buildings looked like they should have been condemned decades ago and the streets were filled with people carrying possessions and merchandise on their heads and milling around like they had nothing better to do with themselves. What in God’s name, Bendick wondered, would make a man who could spend tens of millions just to get a one-to-one meeting live in a dump like this? As to where the dump was, he figured it had to be Africa, just from the fact that just about everyone he could see was black, and the city was built on the sea, because they’d flown in over the water to land. Beyond that he knew squat.

  The Range Range drove uphill through the outskirts of the city before arriving at a black wrought-iron gateway, reinforced with painted steel panels behind the ironwork, set into a high concrete wall. There were two armed guards on the gates, but they recognized the car as it approached and had the gates open right away, so that Bendick could be driven right on through. Within the compound he discovered an entirely new world of sprinklers playing over lush green lawns and uniformed gardeners tending to the dazzling flowerbeds. As the car pulled up outside the entrance to a grand, colonial-type mansion white-gloved servants hurried to open the passenger door, greet Bendick with a smile and lead him to a cool, airy suite of rooms, where heavy shutters kept the heat of the sun at bay while a ceiling fan provided a cooling breeze. An hour later, once he’d showered, changed and finished a light breakfast, perfectly prepared to his exact specifications and eaten on a shaded balcony overlooking the gardens, Aram Bendick was ready to meet his host.

  He was led downstairs, back across the entrance hall and into a private study. A black man was sitting behind a desk at the far side of the room from the door. He had a beard and short, tightly curled hair, both streaked with gray, and although he looked broad-shouldered and imposing when he was sitting down, it was only when the man got to his feet that Bendick appreciated the sheer scale of him. The man was a mountain on legs.

  “I’m Juan Tumbo,” he said in an African-American voice that seemed to rumble up from the bowels of the earth, taking Bendick’s hand in a bone-crushing grip. “Good of you to come’n see me, ’Ram—hope you don’t mind me calling you that, now that we’re business associates. They lookin’ after you here? The place is only a rental, servants come with the building.”

  “They looked after me fine, Mr. Tumbo, and if my wife was here she’d say the house was quaint, but that city out there’s gotta be the shittiest, most godforsaken dump I ever saw,” Bendick began. “Makes East Harlem look like Monte frickin’ Carlo, you know what I’m saying? And, excuse me for asking, but where the hell am I anyway?”

  Tumbo smiled, entirely untroubled by Bendick’s aggressive, abusive style. “Cabinda City, capital of the great state of Cabinda. And yeah, the city’s ’bout as bad as you say, but come on over here to the window—see the ocean out there? Underneath that water they got some of the richest oil and gas deposits in the world: billions of barrels of it.” Tumbo smiled. “Tens of billions, in fact.”

  “So, what, you dragged me halfway across the world because you want me to invest in some kind of oil project?” Bendick sneered. “Screw you, I got a million others I could choose from.”

  Tumbo moved closer to Bendick, looming over him. “You want to mouth off, trying to impress me with what a big swinging dick you got, or you want to make some serious coin? I don’t want you to invest in an oil project, I want you to invest against it. I mean, you know how to make money on a stock that’s going down, right?”

  Now Bendick was a little more interested. “Yeah, and I got a fifty-thousand-square-foot mansion in East Hampton, a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot yacht, a gazillion acres in Montana and a three-floor, sixteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue to prove it. What’s the play?”

  “The play is, I got a bone to pick with a dude name of Hector Cross. This motherfucker killed the one person in the world I ever truly cared for, fed him to the crocodiles. Fed him alive.”

  “You’re shitting me,” said Bendick, at the same time thinking, Is this brick shithouse telling me he’s a goddamn fairy?

  “No, that’s the literal truth,” said Tumbo. His voice had lost its calm, well-spoken tone and taken on a harsher, cruder note. “Cross turned my man into breakfast for a pair of frickin’ purses with teeth. Now, I’m not happy ’bout that. Fact I want to kill the son of a bitch. But, see, the more I think about it, the more I ask myself whether killing him is enough. The answer I get is no. I wanna see him suffer. I want him brought down low. I want him to know what it’s like to be poor, feel humiliation, be afraid for hisself and his family, feel it deep in his bones. That’s where you come in, ’cause the more Cross loses, the more you and me win.”

  “How are you planning on doing that, exactly?”

  “By poisoning the well that provides Cross and his kid with all their money: Bannock Oil. See, I got a lot of information about that particular corporation: inside information, shit that don’ get made public. I know exactly how to hurt Bannock and Cross as well, hurt ’em in a way that’ll take eighty, ninety percent off the share price and make Cross about as popular as a leper with a bomb. Way I figure it, you can bet against Bannock on the way down, then use the money you make to buy the whole damn business at ten cents on the dollar, five if you’re lucky.”

  “So why me? Why don’t you do the whole deal yourself?”

  “Well, let’s just say I value my privacy. Plus, I checked you out. I saw how you operate, bad-mouthing corporations and executives, throwing any crazy shit you can find at them, all over the internet, the media
, dragging chief executives through the mud. I like your style, man.”

  “OK, but what do you want from the deal, aside from screwing Cross over?”

  “Half the money, that’s what.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then your wife’s a widow. So, you in?”

  “You making me an offer I can’t refuse?”

  “No, I’m making you an offer you’d have to have garbage for brains to refuse.”

  Bendick shrugged. “Is that what you think? You haven’t told me what the deal is. All you said is you want to hurt Hector Cross, like I could give a shit about that, and you’re gonna bring down Bannock. But you haven’t said how you’re going to do that, and I can tell, just by listening to you, that you don’t have the first frickin’ clue about the best way to profit from a corporate meltdown. So go ahead, big boy, tell me what you really got to offer me.”

  Tumbo didn’t say anything. He just looked down at Bendick and for a moment the financier was truly afraid that he’d gone too far. The way Tumbo was gritting his teeth, like he was really struggling against a powerful inner impulse, it was possible he might just forget about all the money he had riding on Bendick’s safe return.

  Finally, Tumbo spoke. “Don’t you ever, ever disrespect me like that again, ’cause if you do, I’m going to rip your ugly kike head right off of your scrawny white neck . . .” He raised his hands, the fingers spread, and then he bunched his fists, just inches from Bendick’s suddenly sweating face. “You don’ know how lucky you are, boy. I’ve killed men for way less’n you just said. But I’m working on my anger management, trying to turn over a new leaf, so I’m gonna take a deep breath, count to ten and then I’ll tell you as much as you need, or wanna know.”

  Bendick didn’t say anything. For once in his life, there was nothing he could say to help him get what he wanted. He just had to zip it and let this very large, very angry man take his time, let him count to a hundred if it made him feel better.

  Luckily, ten seemed to do the trick. Tumbo exhaled slowly, breathed in again and then said, “Bannock Oil lost a rig up in the Arctic, right?”